Jonathon Keats, Contributor

I comment on art exhibitions around the world.

11/27/2012 @ 9:46AM  | 1,776 views

Funnel Cities And Towns On

Feet? How To Live With The
Visionary Architecture Of Walter
Jonas And Archigram
In the early 1970s,
West Germany
planned to build cities
shaped like funnels.
Designed by a Swiss-
German painter named
Walter Jonas, they
looked rational enough
in plans and models.
Seven hundred
housing units were
stacked in concentric
circles. Beneath them
were rings of shops,
with supporting infrastructure embedded in the center. Jonas believed that the
inward orientation of his Intrapolis would make people more community-
focused, and he argued that his cities’ minimal contact with the ground would
save valuable soil. The West German Ministry of Construction agreed, and was
held back only by lack of funding. Thus was Jonas’ spectacular vision saved
from the ignominious fate of actually getting built.

Though certainly unique, the Intrapolis project is far from alone in the class of
architecture better left on paper. The best of these unbuilt buildings and
undeveloped developments – some of which can currently be seen at Berlin’s
Hamburger Bahnhof – can have as much impact on society as concrete
skyscrapers and cities, but by opposite means. Whereas ordinary architecture
literally shapes the way in which we live, unrealized plans and models provide
infrastructure for our collective imagination. They are meeting places for
conversation.

If built architecture must be judged by practical criteria – such as whether it

leaks or drives people crazy – speculative architecture should be valued for its
outrageous impracticality. Jonas’s Intrapolis is fascinating for what it reveals
about our conventional way of making cities, where skyscrapers are erected
higher and higher to hold more and more people in bunkered units, and to give
the most privileged tenants a view unobstructed by overdevelopment. (The
others have TV for their viewing pleasure.) Jonas’s funnels question the
assumption that urban residences ought to be refuges from the cities in which
we live, and encourage us to consider more holistic options. The Intrapolis
captivates us precisely because it’s so bizarrely different from anything in our
experience. It belongs to an alternate reality that we can visit to escape the
built-in assumptions of our everyday environment.

The British art collective Archigram explored even more extreme alternatives.
Uninhibited by the urge to build what they designed, they proposed dozens of
outlandish ideas between 1961 and 1974. One of the most famous was the
Plug-In City, schemed by group member Peter Cook in 1964. The Plug-In City
rejected the assumption that buildings be fixed in place, instead envisioning a
permanent scaffolding supporting moveable living units. No longer were you
doomed to endure your neighbors. You could pick up your pod – using one of
several communal cranes – and plug into the common infrastructure
anywhere you wanted. The Plug-In City had the vibrant social dynamic of a
cocktail party.

The Walking City envisioned by Archigram’s Ron Herron in the same year
addressed a different issue: What happens when a city is no longer situated in
a region where the populace wants to live? Unlike ordinary towns, Herron’s
metropolis didn’t have to be abandoned since it had its own set of legs. The
physical impossibility was beside the point. Herron’s plan rejected the
standard notion that a city is a location, instead construing it as a
superorganism.

In a sense, speculative architecture is akin to science fiction. A story by Philip

K. Dick or a movie by Ridley Scott sets out a parallel universe that exposes our
narrow-mindedness by either mirroring our prejudices or revealing alternate
worldviews. Yet there are also crucial differences between sci-fi and the paper
architecture of Archigram (or masters such as the Italian Futurist Antonio
Sant’Elia and the American visionary Lebbeus Woods). Whereas science
fiction is a narrative, with a single track from start to finish, architectural plans
and models are open-ended. They can be explored every which way. They have
unlimited capacity for collective fantasy, and the looming potential – or threat
– of actually being implemented. Hypothetical architecture is perilous.

Archigram was fortunate never to have their dreams brought down to earth.
(Their only brick-and-mortar legacy is a playground in Buckinghamshire and a
swimming pool made for Rod Stewart.) Walter Jonas’s dream was too costly.
Other visionaries were not so lucky.

In the same years that the Intrapolis was taken up by

the Ministry of Construction, a German architect
named Georg Heinrichs had another brilliant idea:
Since highways were the future, why not build linear
cities above the traffic? The Berlin Senate approved the
provocative concept in 1971, and for the following
decade workers labored to build a third-of-a-mile-long
apartment complex straddling the Autobahn. As might
be expected, the philosophical dimensions of the
project – such as the idea that cities might flow like rivers – were steamrolled
and buried in concrete. By the time the megastructure reached completion in
1980, Berlin mayor Richard von Weizsäcker was comparing it to a curse by the
Devil himself.

The Autobahnüberbauung Schlangenbader Straße is still intact, and it has

come to have a sort of philosophical function in urban planning. It’s now a
textbook example of what to avoid at all cost.

Update: Read an insightful response to this article by ArtInfo architecture and

design writer Kelly Chan.

Follow Jonathon Keats on Twitter… and hear about some of his own
speculative architecture, and see one of the blueprints here.